Gambling reforms in the theatre of the absurd

American TV host Jay Leno once quipped that politics is show business for ugly people.

But in the case of the Australian Greens and Senator Nick Xenophon, it's less show business and more Theatre of the Absurd.

Andrew Wilkie has agreed to support the Gillard Government's gambling reform legislation. Legislation that will increase funding for counselling services, expand gambling help online, ban the promotion of live odds during sports coverage, crack down on online companies offering inducements or credit betting and require voluntary pre-commitment on new poker machines from 2013.

These are wide ranging gambling reforms and with Mr Wilkie's vote the Gillard Government no doubt assumed that they could get on with putting them into action. However, in yet another twist the Greens and Senator Xenophon have announced that they won't support it in the Upper House.

I expected proposals targeting online and credit betting, along with increased funding for problem gambling counsellors, would have been manna from heaven to anti-gambling lobbyists such as Nick Xenophon and the Greens' Richard di Natale. Yet for reasons that can only be explained as the logic of egocentrics, they refuse to support it because it's not their legislation.

Nick Xenophon and the Greens will instead waste more of Parliament's time pursuing their own harm reduction bill in the Senate - despite the fact that both major parties have said they won't support it.

This is the equivalent of a toddler refusing to play tag with the other kids because he wanted to play hide-and-seek instead.

We now have the situation where a South Australian senator and the party that claims to be a legitimate third-party in Australian politics are using gambling reform as a political football.

The Greens and Nick Xenophon could pass the Government's bill, and still introduce their own bill. They could approve increased funding for problem gambling and target online gambling, which is the fastest growing area for problem gambling, without it having any impact on their own bill.

Instead they've decided that if they can't have their version of gambling reform, no-one can have gambling reform. They're taking their bat and ball and going home.

The only possible explanation is that they're hoping something happens with either Peter Slipper or Craig Thomson in the Lower House which will once again change the political landscape in their favour. In the meantime, the rest of us have to sit by and watch the absurd theatrics of supposed gambling reformers making excuses for rejecting gambling reforms.

Anthony Ball is the CEO of ClubsNSW and Executive Director of Clubs Australia, the national umbrella association for clubs. View his full profile here.

Latest Episode

Hot Topic

The Prime Minister has announced Australia will be expanding its military role in Iraq for up to two years. Tony Abbott has signed off on sending 300 Australian soldiers for a joint mission with New Zealand.

It's a fundamental human yearning to be a part of something bigger than one's self, and maybe that's what drove my mate Ash to die, far from home, in a bloody foreign war against Islamic State, writes C August Elliott.